Umberto Eco - Numero Zero

We walked into a large room with red walls and a bare ceiling from which hung an old wrought-iron chandelier, a stag’s head at the bar, hundreds of dusty wine bottles along the walls, and bare wooden tables (it was before dinnertime, said Braggadocio, and they still had no tablecloths... later they’d put on those red-checked cloths and, to order, you had to study the writing on the blackboard, as in a French brasserie). At the tables were students, old-fashioned bohemian types with long hair — not in the ’60s style but that of poets who once wore broad-brimmed hats and lavallière cravats — and a few old men in fairly high spirits; it was difficult to tell whether they had been there since the beginning of the century or whether the new proprietors had hired them as extras. We picked at a plate of cheeses, cured meats, and lardo di Colonnata , and drank some extremely good merlot.

“Nice, eh?” said Braggadocio. “Seems like another world.”

“But what attracts you to this Milan, which ought to have vanished?”

“I’ve told you, I like to see what I’ve almost forgotten, the Milan of my grandfather and of my father.”

He had started to drink, his eyes began to shine, with a paper napkin he dried a circle of wine that had formed on the old wooden table.

“I have a pretty wretched family history. My grandfather was a Fascist leader in what was later called the ominous regime. And back in 1945, on April 25, he was spotted by a partisan as he was trying to slip away not far from here, in Via Cappuccio; they took him and shot him, right there at that corner. It wasn’t until much later that my father found out. He, true to my grandfather’s beliefs, had enlisted in 1943 with the Decima Mas commando unit, and had then been captured at Salò and sent off for a year to Coltano concentration camp. He got through it by the skin of his teeth, they couldn’t find any real accusations against him, and then, in 1946, Togliatti gave the go-ahead for a general amnesty — one of those contradictions of history, the Fascists rehabilitated by the Communists, though perhaps Togliatti was right, we had to return to normality at all costs. But the normality was that my father, with his past, and the shadow of his father, was jobless, and supported by my seamstress mother. And he gradually let himself go, he drank, and all I remember about him is his face full of little red veins and watery eyes, as he rambled on about his obsessions. He didn’t try to justify fascism (he no longer had any ideals), but said that to condemn fascism, the antifascists had told many hideous stories. He didn’t believe in the six million Jews gassed in the camps. I mean, he wasn’t one of those who, even today, argue there was no Holocaust, but he didn’t trust the story that had been put together by the liberators. ‘All exaggerated accounts,’ he used to say. ‘Some survivors say, or that’s what I’ve read at least, that at the center of one camp the mountains of clothes belonging to the murdered were over a hundred meters high. A hundred meters? But do you realize,’ he’d say, ‘that a pile a hundred meters high, seeing it has to rise up like a pyramid, needs to have a base wider than the area of the camp?’”

“But didn’t he realize that anyone who has a terrible experience tends to exaggerate when describing it? You witness a road accident and you describe how the bodies lay in a lake of blood. You’re not trying to make them believe it was as large as Lake Como, you’re simply trying to give the idea that there was a lot of blood. Put yourself in the position of someone remembering one of the most tragic experiences of his life—”

“I’m not denying it, but my father taught me never to take news as gospel truth. The newspapers lie, historians lie, now the television lies. Did you see those news stories a year ago, during the Gulf War, about the dying cormorant covered in tar in the Persian Gulf? Then it was shown to be impossible for cormorants to be in the Gulf at that time of year, and the pictures had been taken eight years earlier, during the time of the Iran-Iraq War. Or, according to others, cormorants had been taken from the zoo and covered with crude oil, which was what they must have done with Fascist crimes. Let’s be clear, I have no sympathy for the beliefs of my father and my grandfather, nor do I want to pretend that Jews were not murdered. But I no longer trust anything. Did the Americans really go to the Moon? It’s not impossible that they staged the whole thing in a studio — if you look at the shadows of the astronauts after the Moon landing, they’re not believable. And did the Gulf War really happen, or did they just show us old clips from the archives? There are lies all around us, and if you know they’re feeding you lies, you’ve got to be suspicious all the time. I’m suspicious, I’m always suspicious. The only real proven thing, for me, is this Milan of many decades ago. The bombing actually happened, and what’s more, it was done by the English, or the Americans.”

“And your father?”

“He died an alcoholic when I was thirteen. And to rid myself of those memories, once I’d grown up, I decided to throw myself in the opposite direction. In 1968 I was already thirty, but I let my hair grow, wore a parka and a sweater, and joined a Maoist commune. Later I discovered not only that Mao had killed more people than Stalin and Hitler put together, but also that the Maoists may well have been infiltrated by the secret services. And so I stuck to being a journalist and hunting out conspiracies. That way, I managed to avoid getting caught up with the Red terrorists (and I had some dangerous friends). I’d lost all faith in everything, except for the certainty that there’s always someone behind our backs waiting to deceive us.”

“And now?”

“And now, if this newspaper takes off, maybe I’ve found a place where my discovery will be appreciated... I’m working on a story that... Apart from the newspaper, there might even be a book in it. And then... But let’s change the subject, let’s say we’ll talk about it once I’ve put all the facts together... It’s just that I have to get it done soon, I need the money. The few lire we’re getting from Simei will go some way, but not enough.”

“To live on?”

“No, to buy me a car. Obviously I’ll have to get a loan, but I still have to pay. And I need it now, for my investigation.”

“Sorry, you say you want to make money from your investigation to buy the car, but you need the car to do your investigation.”

“To piece a number of things together I need to travel, visit a few places, perhaps interview some people. Without the car and having to go to the office each day, I have to put it together from memory, do it all in my head. As if that was the only problem.”

“So what’s the real problem?”

“Well, it’s not that I’m indecisive, but to understand what I have to do, I must put together all the data. A bit of data on its own means nothing, all of it together lets you understand what you were unable to see at first. You have to uncover what they’re trying to hide from you.”

“You’re talking about your investigation?”

“No, I’m talking about choosing the car...”

He was drawing on the table with a finger dipped in wine, almost as if he were marking out a series of dots that had to be joined together to create a figure, like in a puzzle magazine.

“A car needs to be fast and classy, I’m certainly not looking for a minivan, and then for me it’s either front-wheel drive or nothing. I was thinking of a Lancia Thema turbo sixteen-valve, it’s one of the more expensive, almost sixty million lire. I could even attempt two hundred and thirty-five kilometers an hour and acceleration from a standstill in seven point two. That’s almost the top.”